Talk:Game of Thrones: The Noble Houses of Westeros
It's sad how excited I am for this book. Certainly if not heraldry we don't already have we'll be getting decent quality versions of existing ones.--Ser Patrek (talk) 08:57, September 7, 2015 (UTC) :Assuming they put actual work into this thing and it isn't just a cheap knockoff. Doesn't sound like that though.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 15:06, September 7, 2015 (UTC) I had a chance to flip through the whole thing in the HBO Store: it isn't anything significantly new at all, and I personally won't buy it. It's as if, quite literally, someone printed out the online HBO Viewer's Guide. It contains no new interviews whatsoever. It doesn't even really contain any costume images we don't already have. Yes it does have some closeup images of the costumes worn by characters from each faction - behind the scenes photos of them on display, like at exhibitions and stuff. But I kind of already hunted down many of those images for our own Costumes section (we have high-res behind the scenes photos of Tyrion's costumes already). A few of them might be new closeups - but they're really just closeups of costumes we've already seen, nothing jumped out at me as a detail you wouldn't already have. Absolutely no new heraldry designs were present whatsoever. It only covers the 11 Great Houses currently in the show, and much like the Viewer's Guide website, it mentions some of their major vassals but doesn't have a sidebar or something for "House Umber" with artwork. The entire thing is a major letdown. I get the feeling this thing was a placeholder made because they didn't have the time to make another "Inside Game of Thrones" -- well, I didn't expect them to, those only come out every two years or so and are a lot of work. This was just "generic coffee table book in time for Christmas". The only thing that really brought this book to anyone's attention was that it lists Jon Snow and Stannis Baratheon as "dead" -- to be blunt, absolutely nothing canonical should be read into that statement whatsoever. The TV scriptwriters didn't oversee or okay this, I don't think - or even if they did, which I doubt, HBO isn't above lying -- what, you think they'd seriously list Stannis as alive if the show was pretending he was dead? No, they'd go along with it. But either way, it seems like just a generic TV guide type description, not an "insight" or "exclusive official news". So whatever. The nice things I can say about the book are.....well, for a generic coffee table book which is essentially a physical printout of much of the HBO Viewer's Guide website....if that was the goal, they did a good job. I'm serious. I checked, and there are no factual errors whatsoever, not in the family trees or anything. The screenshots they use (Dragonstone, Winterfell, etc.) aren't original but they are good choices, as are the cast images. Overall, again, if you were setting out to quickly make a generic guidebook to the Great Houses of Westeros as they appear in the TV show, they did it quite well. The cover art is also quite pretty. Put another way, we might just be holding it up to the high standard of the "Inside Game of Thrones" novels - this was only really meant to be a short basic, pleasant thing, and we were hoping for something more exhaustive. Considering that we unfortunately live in an age in which many people still don't know Daenerys or Tyrion's names after five seasons of watching the show, the very casual TV-first fans might actually enjoy this - albeit as a "stocking stuffer" type gift. It's more of a "light gift" -- it's not meant to be in-depth research like "Inside Game of Thrones" but "light coffee table reading, finished forever in under an hour." But again I must stress: it contains absolutely no new information of any kind. Absolutely no new artwork. They have some behind the scenes display images of character costumes which are pleasant, some but not all of which we may have never seen before, but they're not worth buying it for (the images will float around tumblr sooner or later, and aren't even worth waiting for). So on the whole, this was a missed opportunity.--The Dragon Demands (talk) 18:39, December 5, 2015 (UTC)